One of the most common problems we encounter within small businesses and startups is a lack of understanding of which activities drive marketing results.
As ridiculous as this sounds, we see this a lot. We see it because it’s not obvious how to evaluate your marketing activities unless you’re an experienced marketer. And it’s a problem as you don’t generally have any money to waste when you’re a small business or startup.
Luckily, there are some simple ways to start tracking your marketing efforts (no matter how small) to better understand whether the channels, messaging and artwork you’re using are working well for you.
Marketing Tracking Links
The simple answer is that you need to use tracking links. These often look something like: https://doublehmarketing.com.au/?utm_source=facebook&%3Butm_medium=banner&%3Butm_campaign=examplecampaign&%3Butm_content=blueversion
The information after the ? contains all of the useful marketing information. The above tracking link tells us that:
- The channel is Facebook
- The medium (or type of content) is a banner ad
- The campaign is called example campaign
- And that this is the blue version of the ad.
Most analytics programs support these types of links, and they can help you understand who came to your app or website from channels you’re actively marketing in and what those users do once they reach your app or website.
Many Australian businesses use the free version of Google Analytics, which enables them to add these types of customised links to all marketing content they share. These links send data back to their Google Analytics property each time they are clicked, confirming the channel the click came from (LinkedIn, Facebook), the type of content used in that channel (paid, organic) and the exact content used.
To set up your own tracking links in Google Analytics, you will first need a Google Analytics account, and you can then use Google’s Campaign URL Builder to set up your customised links (known as UTM tracking links). It’s important to note that these links will only work within your own Google Analytics account, so the tracking will only work on your own website(s) or App(s).
Marketing Tracking Links in Action
Let’s begin with a B2B marketing example. This business builds and sells software for financial management, and it wants small business owners to register for a free trial on its website. It uses LinkedIn advertising to promote its software. It’s also running a test campaign on Facebook after some internal discussions about whether this is the ‘right’ channel for its business.
After setting up UTM tracking links, the business can now see, in their Google Analytics account, which channels are actually a) sending traffic to their website and b) if that traffic is actually registering for a free trial. Interestingly, it finds that Facebook Ads aren’t actually sending much traffic to the website and that none of the traffic from Facebook registered for a free trial over a 2-week period. Therefore, it is concluded that Facebook a) isn’t reaching the right audience on Facebook yet, and b) Facebook isn’t the right platform for this particular offer. Further A/B testing will determine which hypothesis is correct.
A B2C example provides a similar story, except we can link the channel directly to a sale. An online clothing retailer wants to understand how much influence Pinterest advertising truly has on driving sales, and so uses tracking links to understand a) how much traffic comes to their website b) how many sales result from this and c) whether the average cart size is worth the advertising spend.
Finally, we come to B2B2C. This is classically the hardest area to track in marketing, as there’s often a retailer or distributor that speaks directly with your customer, and they own the customer data. We’d love to say that there’s a simple solution in all cases here, but this unfortunately isn’t the case. To effectively evaluate marketing activities, you will need to partner with the retailer or distributor to access the results of their marketing tracking, or you could set up a marketing campaign on their behalf, enabling you to use your own analytics program to help determine success.
Using Marketing Tracking Links
While they don’t solve every marketing challenge, tracking links are remarkably useful for understanding channel, campaign, messaging, and creative effectiveness if used well.
In addition, if you run many non-digital activities, QR codes can be a great way of making links user-friendly and enabling tracking on these. Bitly is also a great way of shortening UTM or other tracking links if you’re concerned that these might be off-putting to customers (or you want to fit them into an SMS campaign).
Finally, they’re also great for email, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud supports Google Analytics links in particular.
